The loss of words

You want me to cut short a mother's wail,
stop her while she tells me how she buried her daughter
how she put the green kurta in the coffin
and the clips, and the purse and her hopes and her despair
and her loss too

You want for your inches' sake, for the column width
to cut her tale in half
of how she saw Afroz skip the poodles of water, the muddy corners of the alley
of how she never looked back, and how she tightly held her umbrella
and then she had disappeared at the corner of the alley
and never turned back
and then an hour later, people came rushing to her house
shouting, and screaming
there was a stampede and girls had died at the school
Afroz, the robust, tall and beautiful girl was one of them

You want me to shrink it, edit it, cut it, delete the emotion, erase the pain, take everything out, tighten the graphs, strangle everything, mutilate it all, because there's no space tonight
but it is emptiness in her eyes that makes me write
and her voice is heavy with the narration of a lifetime
On that day, Afroz woke up early for the Sehri, said her prayers
Then sat and crammed her notes
And then she left for school

And you want to keep it tight, keep it short
And I don't know how to
I can't not let her cry, and I can't not write about how beautifully she cried
She had waited outside the hospital for hours
and they would not let her see her
those hours, the wait, the lag, the despair, the helplessness
and you want me to condense it in one line
because there are the inches, the column width, the advertisments, and crime spots
So the tale of the poor mother's dead daughter needs to be cut

No I can't contain the agony in 500 words
I can't betray the mother, and her daughter
Because the poor have nothing but their anger and hurt
and their loss
they let her in and there Afroz lay there in the corner
after the other four who had died
when the boys chased them up and down the narow staircase at school
and they had shouted, screamed, tried to run
but they gave up
They didn't let her near the body
she saw the hand upturned
she asked the policeman to place it at her side
she had lurched forward
but they held her back
she saw the marks, too
then they gave them the body
and they brought it home

I know the space is tight tonight, but the story hangs heavy on me
I can't rid of it except here
Because the pain of the poor, the tales of loss must be written
I can't justify why you should run it
I can't pitch it
except that when a young boy walks to the grave of his sister,
and kneels down near the freshly-dug grave and lights incense sticks
the image sticks to me, and I can't shake it off
So I need to write
And you tell me it is getting too long

But Wasim walked everyday to the grave at 6 a.m.
and each day he carried the incense sticks
and he spends hours at the grave still
because back at home, Aesha is not there to play carrom with him
And all this, you want me to fit in a sentence
It is hard
It is like cutting his walk short, like asking him to stop because I have a quote
and I am done
And so I linger, I let him talk
And then I am back on the page
chopping a bit off here and there
mostly the conjunctions, the extra ones
But I can't lose more of this loss
because it makes me angry, sad, and whole lot of other things

So, I didn't chop much tonight
Because I couldn't
And the loss was too much for me to press it in a mere 500-word piece
Because the poor have nothing but their loss
and I have nothing but the words
So I let the tale flow
Maybe you can cut it
I went into the homes, and sat beside the wailing mothers
who felt alone because nobody ever came to ask them about the loss
the ministers made announcements, they expressed shock and regret and ordered probes
but nobody came knocking to ask them how they were coping
because loss is a heavy burden to carry and it spreads
Its emptiness fills you, and it overflows and spreads again
So the loss needs to be cut, the tales need to be edited
So you do it.
How can I?
I had looked at the pictures, and I became part of the loss
I carried those with me, in my head, and my notes
And you want me to lose it all
because nobody writes that long
But I refuse
Because loss is all that they have